According to NanoWerk, UC Riverside researchers have come up with a memory device based on telescoping multi-walled carbon nanotubes. According to one of the researchers, "This finding leads to a promising potential to build ultrafast high-density nonvolatile memory, up to 100 gigahertz or into the terahertz range" and a prototype could be demonstrated "in the next two to three years." Similar devices from UCLA and Caltech based on bistable rotaxanes are farther along in being integrated into actual memory circuits, but tend to break after a fairly small number of position changes. Carbon nanotubes may promise more durable switches.

ultrafast high-density nonvolatile memoryApparently it will be a series of tubes which you will be able to just dump something on, because the tubes will be able to store an enormous amount of material, enormous amount of material.

I think it did a lot of work as a serial processor. From this description [upenn.edu]:

"The ENIAC was controlled through a train of electronic pulses."

--and--

"because the various units of the ENIAC could operate simultaneously, the ENIAC could perform calculations in parallel. (BUT!) ENIAC programmers tended to avoid this use because the impressive but limited reliability of the ENIAC favored the use of as few units as possible for a given application."

It looks to me like they've essentially created what could be compared to a nano-abacus. I wonder how immune this system would be to physical movement (i.e. jarring). In a similar vein, I would imagine that it would be just as static sensitive as most other memory devices even though.

Did I miss something, though? How is the position of the telescoping tube read? Applying a current to it would change the position, would it not?

I imagine this would be just as immune to physical jarring as say blood cells in your blood vessels would be wouldn't it? Or as resiliant as the atomic bond in elements are.. At this scale the physical movements that we create as humans wouldn't be felt, similar as the molecules in your hand don't feel it when you wave at someone, but the hand as a whole feels it..
or at least that is what I would think

Ehm, just a thought: first you put a possitive V on one side, making it go to the right (picture b). After that you put a (higher) possitive voltage to the outer tube (note that it is also connected, initially to the ground). The left simply acts as ground, not atracting the inner tube. Could this work? This would also mean that the tube would stay attracted to the right, solving the first problem you came up with.

At the nano scale, momentum of objects is near zero and friction forces, van der waals, and the like dominate entirely. Macro-scale motion, and even intense vibration, simply won't move things around relative to each other.

We've already passed that introduction stage. You have been able to buy "solid state" commercial of-the shelf parts (high speed, very high rewrite endurance non volatile memory... and even microcontrollers) based on similar processes of molecule reshapings (no carbon nanotubes in them, though) for years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM [wikipedia.org]

Carbon's pretty good. I assume you could use diamond in it's purest form to make the basis of a processor after doping it properly to make it a transistor. Thermal tolerances for these would be excellent.
But I think I'll wait for Ovonic Unified Memory. It's already technology in use today, just done a bit differently for the applications I'm waiting for it to be used for.

Diamond as semiconductor has been studied for some time. There are some progress [aist.go.jp] recently. But it is not easy to make big single crystal diamond yet, not to mention single crystal diamond wafer. Just imagine how difficult it could be to polish the diamond wafer without introducing many defects, and how hard could it be to characterize how many defects you get in the wafer.

You oust an existing technology, you need more than a high coolness factor. NAND flash costs less than 2c per MByte and falling. There are plenty factories set up to produce it, it is fast enough and low power enough for most mobile applications.

In 2-3 years there might be a nanotube demo, but that's a long way from being something that you can mass produce for significantly lower cost than NAND.

Better check yourself before you wreck yourself, Khyber. You're talking about a silicate glass technology that's just now maturing. If what you say IS true with this technology, then we will indeed have massively faster drives and storage access, not to mention the size (I can forsee these drives exceeding any physical steel platter solutions) since this technology you mention results in far smaller sizes die-wise for memory.While I'd hope for this as a replacement for SRAM, since it's nearly as fast, I'm s

Just FYI,/. crowd, yes, I am talking to myself. I'm MPD-diagnosed, and I argue with myself on this simple shit all day long. Ignore my other self and relax, guys. We're not taking over the world like the daydream version of myself wants to. It's all good.
Just play some Cypress Hill and he'll be subdued. He's a stoner, a bright one, but the fucker just jumps to far too many conclusions to have a rational stoned mind like Einstein and many other great intoxicated scientists.
I can't believe I share his fu

I wouldn't condemn Nantero to vaporware status just yet - it seems that they've been making progress. Here's a list of their press releases [nantero.com] - notice that they successfully fabricated a switch in April and have made their processes compatible with current CMOS fab lines.

I've just seen that figure too many times now... 2 years is still a short enough time that it might seem feasable but still long enough away that by the time it has gone by, most everybody will have forgotten about it and moved on to something else.

It'd be really neat if this turns out to be genuine, but I'm not holding my breath. Been disappointed too many times already.

This technology http://www.nantero.com/mission.html [nantero.com] is suppose to be ready some time this year. It use cnt as lever in a small relay. They call their memory nram and it is suppose to be very fast access and non-volatile. There is a video at their site explaining how its memory works.

I've just seen that figure too many times now... 2 years is still a short enough time that it might seem feasable but still long enough away that by the time it has gone by, most everybody will have forgotten about it and moved on to something else.

2-3 years to early prototype5 years to well working prototype7-8 years to get it to mass production10+ years to consumer markets...even if this stuff is true, it's far off in the future. But, I guess we can hope...

Memory and/or processors running at 100Ghz sounds great, but how is such a chip going to be connected to the outside world of peripherals? Beams of light? Waveguides? Or will everything have to be contained on one chip?

This is a growing problem. Far too many terms are being introduced with uncertain pronunciation, and the initiators really should provide phonetics. (It's interesting that even the NATO/ITU alphabet needs phonetic explanation because it uses words like "Charlie" and "Whiskey")

Apart from Linux (Linnux? Leenux? Lie-nux?) there are the old saws of schoolteachers - words like periodate, unionised, benzoyl - and even simple looking words like "kilometre" - kilo-metre or kilom-eter?

What part of 'This finding leads to a promising potential to build ultrafast high-density nonvolatile memory, up to 100 gigahertz or into the terahertz range" and a prototype could be demonstrated "in the next two to three years".' reminds me of the Monty Python comment in a spoof ad that "up to" includes zero?

When a paper is as full of weasel words as this one, reach for your Dilbert collection.

Just like that holographic storage that was going to replace hard drives "in 2-3 years"... almost a decade ago.

That's not to say that this *won't* happen, just that it's yet another "We're going to change the world in a few years!" idea, which should really be a "We'll wake you up if anything ever becomes of this." sort of message.

Wow. It's been a long time since I've read an abstract with that little information in it. What a vapid piece of fucking trash. I'm sure that the next paper out of that research group will be "Telescoping carbon nanotube (CNT) space elevators in 3-5 years".No data. No numbers. No quantification, no discussion of advantages or difficulties with the technology. No discussion of the fact that it is quite frigging difficult to get relatively defect-free nanotubes in any sort of practical volume. Somethin